


Faux Foes

by janetcarter



Category: His Dark Materials (TV)
Genre: Accidental Self Harm, Episode Tag: The Scholar, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jealousy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27925282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janetcarter/pseuds/janetcarter
Summary: Marisa Coulter and a world of women she should have been.
Relationships: Lyra Belacqua & Marisa Coulter, Marisa Coulter & Mary Malone
Comments: 5
Kudos: 48
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	Faux Foes

**Author's Note:**

> For the Bad Things Happen Bingo prompt "Jealousy/Envy."

Marisa Coulter was not one to throw a childish tantrum over the world being unfair. She learned from a young age that thrashing about at her mother's feet would only invite further wounds. It would only deepen the pit she had been born into, dirt walls already hopelessly marred by her clawing. But that lesson had been learned in accordance with the rules of a singular world, one finite grain of sand twinkling in the desert sun, only to be consumed by infinity's dunes.

The world was unfair. Her world was unfair. Her world should not have been hers.

Mrs. Malone--no, _Dr._ Malone's study had been something out of a dream. It was overflowing with papers the woman herself had written and published under her own name. Marisa wondered how Dr. Malone had managed it judging by the cluttered state of her desk alone, scribbled notes and coffee-stained research papers scattered about. But it was an office; _her_ office, where sunlit windows and crammed bookshelves awarded her for a fraction of the work Marisa herself had done.

It was everything Marisa should have had, but something that was so far out of reach in her own world it would only have been possible in another.

And here she was, in such another world, maintaining a high head and balanced gait as she strode down the cemented street. Women were everywhere, not hidden away until a husband granted them permission to accompany him out, not forced to choose between motherhood and social standing, not coerced into the gleaming, spotless picture of perfection she had sacrificed _everything_ to achieve.

Lyra. She had sacrificed _Lyra_ to achieve it.

And yet, now that her efforts finally allowed for their reunion, the girl ran to Dr. Malone's open arms sharing secrets of Dust with a woman who had tripped and fell into her profession without so much as a scratch on her.

Boreal claimed that, despite the perceived freedoms innately given in this world, injustice writhed beneath the surface. He attributed it in part to an absence of faith, an absence of _daemons._

Well, here she stood, faith long ago swallowed up by the Magisterium and daemon crudely severed, and she could see nothing but a hundred lives she should have lived.

She should not have been the weak-willed pariah crushed beneath the shame of her affair, unable to scale the whole of society with a wailing child in her atrophied arms, while Asriel escaped the wreckage as unscathed as Mary Malone.

She should have been the respected mother unimpeded in academic pursuits, born atop the ground rather than beneath it, proudly showing off her discoveries to her daughter. She should have been the woman pushing her toddler on a red swing after work, the woman whose scarlet lips flirted freely without any concern for a ring, the woman with rosy cheeks whose cluttered office had become a home to a wild girl who was not even her own flesh and blood.

In the swirl of insurmountable rage and chimeric mourning, her nails had pierced her palm. They clawed into her skin as though it was the innate grave she had rescued herself from so many times before, where the woman she might have been lie buried beneath its core.

She should never have known such depths. She should have been deemed worthy without doing a man's work twentyfold and still being left to scrounge for recognition. But as she looked around this world she saw unrestrained, careless women who had been handed _everything_ they had ever "achieved,” she decided that they were not worthy either.

She would rise again, with Lyra at _her_ side, and with the alethiometer paving the way for a world in which they would both _thrive._


End file.
